Zucchini Bread

Fig and Fennel Salad

Thai Pumpkin Soup

Homemade Quince Paste

Rum Bundt Cake

Corn Chowder

Corn Pudding

Thursday, September 25, 2008

I hate wasting food. I really do. But sometimes, I stash things in the freezer merely to avoid the guilt of trashing food at the present moment. By "things" I mean 4 tortillas or 6 egg whites or the heels of a loaf of bread. I have good intentions. I really do. With the tortillas, I envision making a quick wrap for lunch one day. With the egg whites, an angel food cake. With the bread, homemade croutons.

These things sit — preserved, certainly — but effectively, trashed. Inevitably, I clean out the freezer several months down the road and toss the cracked tortillas and frost-encrusted heels of bread into the garbage can.

Anyway, last weekend, I rescued four flour tortillas from meeting their cold fate. When I spotted them in my fridge, I recalled a recipe I had seen on the Blue Heron Farm Web site for asparagus quiche that used tortillas as a shell. And then I played a game called "use every possible item of food in your fridge that can be sautéed and packed into a quiche shell." Never played? Give it a go. It's a great time. What's most fun about the game is that there are no rules: Expiration dates should be overlooked; mold, scraped away and sent down the disposal; shriveled, wilted vegetables, scrubbed and chopped as if they were new.

I wish I could say I were exaggerating. I'm not. I cut off serious mold from a pepper. I gave a block of cheese a chemical peel. I browned a questionable piece of several-days-old hamburger meat. The result? A yummy yummy quiche.

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350ºF.

Step 2: Prep your ingredients. Here I have 1 bell pepper, 1 zucchini, 2 chipotles in adobo, 1 hot chili pepper, 1 tomato, leftover sautéed leeks, grated Parmigiano Reggiano and cilantro. Cook your ingredients. Sauté peppers and onions and such together. (I also had a leftover uncooked hamburger patty, so about 6 ounces of ground beef.) Season with salt and pepper. Add zucchini and tomatoes and cooked leeks. Add cilantro at the end. Note: This is just what I had on hand — use anything you have.

Step 3. Line a buttered dish, such as a 9-inch round baking or pie pan, with about 4 tortillas.Whisk together 3 eggs with 1/2 cup of milk in a large bowl. Add the prepped ingredients. Add the cheese and stir.

Step 4. Pour into prepared tortilla-lined pan. Bake for about 30 minutes or until set. Mixture should jiggle just slightly when shaken.

Step 5: Remove from the oven and let sit for 10 minutes before cutting. Ta-da! A simple simple quiche.

Visual Tour of Polyface Farm:

Meat birds live on grass under floorless pens. Every morning Joel Salatin drags the pen to a fresh patch of grass. Each patch of grass rests 364 days before a group of chickens feeds on it again.

Joel Salatin dragging one of his floorless chicken pens.

The Eggmobile

The eggmobile houses laying hens. It follows the herd of cattle, arriving to grass they've grazed on four days earlier.The hens peck at the four-day-old cow pies, eating various insects, larvae and parasites - rich sources of protein - and accomplishing a whole lot more along the way: By eating the fly larvae and parasites, they rid the land of potential pathogens and disease; by scratching through the droppings and spreading them across the grass, they enable the manure to sink into the ground and fertilize the soil; and by eating the pesky insects, they reduce the presence of one of the cows' biggest irritants.

Joel Salatin

Salatin, surrounded by his laying hens, explains the cow-chicken symbiosis on his farm. Salatin refers to his laying hens as his "sanitation crew."

Shademobile

Cows graze on a fresh patch of grass every day, enclosed by portable electric fencing. This portable shademobile travels to each new patch of grass too, always allowing the cows shelter from the sun.

Gobledygo

The gobledygo, a portable shelter for turkeys, also follows the cows. The same symbiotic relationship described above exists between these turkeys and the cows.

The Raken House

Rabbits and chickens coexist in the Raken House. Rabbits live in cages suspended from the ceiling. Chickens roam around on the ground below, scratching the bedding, performing the same "sanitation" duties as described above with the cows.

The Raken House

In the center of the Raken House stand trough-like structures where the hens lay their eggs.

The Raken House

Salatin holds a baby rabbit for a little girl to see.

The Barn

Joel Salatin stands in the open-sided shelter where his cows spends a portion of the winter. During the winter, the cows eat hay (dried grass accumulated throughout the growing season), and live on a bedding consisting of woodchips, sawdust and old hay to absorb the cows' excrement. When the heavy cows tread on their nitrogen-rich manure and on the carbon-rich bedding, packing it together, they allow the mixture to ferment (anaerobic composting). By adding corn to the bedding, Salatin entices his pigs to turn the bedding into compost: When the cows return to pasture in March, the pigs dig through the densely packed bedding, searching for the tasty fermented corn, aerating the pile and turning it into compost for the spring.

The Happiest Pigs Ever

Pigs on Polyface Farm are "finished" in the forest. They spend their final weeks feasting on high-protein nuts and tree bark. This diet purportedly gives their meat great flavor as well as makes their fat healthier — Salatin calls this meat "olive oil pork."

How To Cut a Lemon or A Lime

Step 1: Cut straight down, just to the right of center.

Step Two:

Turn so the cut side is flat on the board. Make another cut just to the right of center.

Step Three:

Repeat step two: Turn; and cut straight down just to the right of center.